


Causation

by Sinna



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Dealing With Trauma, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon, Recovery, Trans Rhys, there's some past Rhys/Vaughn and Rhys/Jack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-14 10:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13005807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sinna/pseuds/Sinna
Summary: The road goes ever on and on…Sasha, Rhys, and the aftermath.





	Causation

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, y'all! Have some kids recovering from trauma

Rhys changed in the year that Sasha didn’t see him.

Well, that wasn’t a surprise. People change, and Rhys had been through a lot. He’d gone from company man with a promotion within his grasp, to fugitive, to reluctant vault hunter, to CEO, all within the space of about a week. It would be enough to change any man.

But Rhys? Well, he was still the same nerdy guy who stumbled over his words trying to compliment her new clothes and ran into danger to protect his friends.

But the way he carried himself… it was different. Fiona filled her in on a few things. Along with everything else, Rhys had apparently been dealing with a holographic AI version of Handsome Jack trapped in his cybernetics; a constant nuisance who taunted and tempted him by turns and then tried to kill him. Sasha didn’t understand the hard on all the Hyperion employees had for Handsome Jack. But she did know what it was like to be betrayed completely by someone you looked up to.

To her surprise, he was the first to mention it. As Fiona, Athena, and Springs put the finishing touches on their plan to take down the vault guardian, he pulled her aside.

“Would you have done it?” he asked.

She stared at him blankly.

“If it had been you instead of Fiona when Felix stole the cash,” he clarified. “Would you have let him die?”

“Yeah,” she admitted quietly. “I would have. I mean, I probably would have regretted it, but I would have done it.”

“I thought that might be what you’d say.”

He pressed a small scramble of metal and wires into her hand.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s Handsome Jack,” he explained.

Oh. Now she recognized it. This was – no, it had been Rhys’ eye. The change in color made sense now.

“I couldn’t bring myself to completely destroy him, but I thought maybe… well, I kinda figured you might know what to do. I mean, you don’t have to do anything. It’s really far too late for me to ask you to help with this, but-”

She tucked the dormant cybernetic in her pocket.

“I’m still mad at you for not telling us about this. But I’ll take care of it.”

He smiled, and the bags under his eyes seemed just a little lighter.

“Thank you, Sasha.”

She forgot about it until almost a week later. Remarkably, it was still intact despite her fighting the vault monster, nearly dying, Felix’ “miraculous” gift, and the subsequent excitement that had ensued when Fiona and Rhys disappeared into the vault.

She looked at the tiny mess of wires and metal. This was the remains of the man who had nearly destroyed the only home she’d ever known? This tiny program had been enough to bring down Hyperion?

She knew Rhys had given it to her in hopes that she’d destroy it, but she found herself hesitating. This was Rhys’ demon, not hers. The Handsome Jack that had destroyed Pandora was already dead. She would gain no satisfaction from crushing this harmless facsimile. Instead, she tossed it in a drawer and tried to forget about it.

\--

Athena and Spring’s wedding was an affair to be remembered. The sheer number of vault hunters in attendance had to be some sort of hazard, and that wasn’t even taking the fireworks into account. Like Scooter, it seemed that Janey Springs had no concept of subtlety or restraint. Sasha had to admit she kind of liked it. There were little finger snacks and drakefruit slices and it was kind of a dream.

 Athena, on the other hand, seemed entirely out of her element, but her affection for Springs had clearly won out over her desire for a small ceremony. Sasha imagined this might have been her way of apologizing for lying and getting captured. Or maybe not. Athena might do anything just to make Springs smile

Fiona was gleefully lifting jewelry and returning it with feigned concern and a story about seeing it fall off. Sasha was relatively sure it was just something to keep herself entertained. Although if Fiona was planning on actually lifting anything Sasha had a list of nice jewels she wanted.

Rhys found her by the dessert table.

“Hey, Sasha.”

“Rhys! How’s the CEO business going?”

She meant it as a jibe, but her delight at seeing him bled into her words.

“I mean, we still have a long way to go, but Atlas is starting to become something again. I’m setting up a new headquarters on Eden-3. I’ve got Doctor Cassius, Gortys, Loader Bot, and a few of the less bloodthirsty former Hyperion employees. Plus Yvette has been a huge help, and I can always call Vaughn if there’s any accounting issues.”

“Sounds like fun,” she offered.

“You think?” he looked entirely too pleased by her answer.

She hesitated. Usually, he was good at recognizing sarcasm when he heard it.

He pulled up his ECHO comm. “I have something for you.”

A notification popped up on her own comm – a new AtlasTech prototype he’d sent her a few months prior.

_Virtual Certificate_

_Redeemable for rocket travel to Eden-3 on any date of the recipient’s choosing. Round trip optional._

She stared.

“Rhys?”

“I want the new Atlas to be better than the corporations that came before it. I want us to do some good. Maybe even help to fix Pandora. But I could use a less, well, corporate perspective. And I want you to see that we can do good things. Things like the plants in that dome. Well, maybe not exactly like those plants, but you get the idea?”

Sasha giggled.

“I’ll have to think on it, Rhys. But I think I’d like to see what you can do.”

\--

She showed Fiona the certificate later that night.

“What do you think?” she asked quietly.

“It’s always been your dream to leave Pandora, hasn’t it?” Fiona reminded her.

“I know, but we always said we’d go together.”

Sasha felt somewhat like a child again, begging for an extra cookie.

“Say the word, and we will,” Fiona promised.

But…                                                                                                              

She didn’t say it, but Sasha knew that for all that Fiona hated Pandora, it was her home in a way it had never been Sasha’s.

“Well, I can always make him send me back,” she decided.

Fiona smiled and hugged her.

“Go show him what’s what.”

“You bet your ass I will.”

\--

Rhys was like an excited puppy, already bouncing on his heels when she got off the ship. She lifted her sunglasses to her head and looked around, taking in the somewhat rundown spaceport.

“It’s not Hyperion, but it does the trick,” he told her, reaching out with his cybernetic arm to take her suitcase. “Ready for the VIP tour?”

“I hope you’re a better tour guide than Fiona,” she teased.

“No promises.”

Despite that, he was actually quite good, although that was probably the sheer enthusiasm more than any tour guiding skills. Then again, Sasha knew as much about corporate tours as anyone from Pandora – which was to say, very little – so maybe that was what tour guides were supposed to be like.

Atlas’ new headquarters were small and shabby compared to Hyperion, but everyone there smiled at Rhys when he stopped in to show Sasha their work.

“I gave Athena a mark-I prototype for her wedding,” Rhys explained, pointing out a latte machine similar to the one they’d found in the dome. “We took the one Dr. Cassius had apart and figured out how it worked. The mark-II is almost ready for the market, and we’ve already got several interested parties inquiring after it. Apparently, Athena isn’t the only one who really liked old Atlas’ lattes.”

“So you’re turning Atlas into a coffee shop?” Sasha said.

“Not quite, but we need something to get us off the ground, and people already trust Atlas with lattes. Once this department gets into full swing, we’ll win back public trust and have more funding for the company as a whole.”

It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the new Atlas already had a rather large cybernetics department. Turned out, Rhys – with a bit of help from Gortys and Yvette – had created his own new cybernetics, with a number of unique features.

He demonstrated his ability to project onto any reasonably flat surface.

“Comes in very handy for board meetings,” he joked.

Sasha didn’t get the joke, but she laughed anyway.

“It’s also fully removable for easier adjustments.”

He demonstrated by removing his entire arm with the push of a button.

“Do you ever bump into that button and just lose your arm?” she asked.

“All the time,” he admitted. “We’re working on that for the next model. LB was thinking a password, but I’m not sure I want anything that complicated, so we’re trying to make something thought activated.”

Sasha suddenly remembered that Handsome Jack had very nearly succeeded at killing Rhys with his own arm. No wonder he wanted this. She imagined he’d had failsafes written into his new eye as well.

Without thinking too hard about it, she took a step closer to him and rested a hand on his flesh and blood arm. The smile he gave her was worth it.

\--

Sasha remembered very little of her mother, but she did remember a phrase whispered in her ear every night before she went to bed. A phrase she knew by heart, though she didn’t understand a word of it. It must have been her and Fiona’s mother’s native tongue, but she’d never known what that was, as their mother had died before she could pass on more than a few words.

“You know you can actually say enhance to zoom in on the picture,” Rhys said over her shoulder as she stared at the image Fiona had sent from her latest mission.

“It can hear me talk?” she asked suspiciously.

“Er, essentially, yes,” he admitted. “It’s programmed to recognize your voice. So you can tap this button over here-” he gestured to a small picture of a microphone “- and it will start listening to you and do whatever you tell it to. Like this.”

He opened his own interface.

“Search ‘Hottest Up and Coming CEO’,” he said.

A recent article from the Eden Daily popped up. Sasha laughed. Rhys had been insufferable ever since it had been published.

She held her wrist close to her face, scrutinizing the button she’d never noticed before.

“I can search anything?”

“Yup! It also has translation capabilities, and it can play music.”

Later that evening, Sasha searched her mother’s words.

“ _Te amo_?” Rhys repeated from the other side of the room, where he was tinkering with some sort of prototype. She hadn’t realized he could hear her.

His accent was atrocious, but there was still something oddly sweet about hearing those words from another person again. Even if he had no clue what he was saying.

“It’s something my mother used to say to me,” Sasha explained. “I never knew what it meant.”

“What does it mean?” Rhys asked.

“It means ‘I love you’,” she said.

Rhys turned bright red. “Oh, so I probably… shouldn’t say that to you?”

Sasha grinned. “I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

She meant it as a joke, but too quickly realized how it might have sounded. She blushed and ducked her head, only looking up when Rhys’ boots intruded on her field of vision.

“Okay, so I’m going to kiss you now, and if you don’t want me to, please let me know by some method that doesn’t involve bodily harm?”

Sasha looked up and met his lips with her own.

Kissing Rhys reminded her of a light rain on a burning summer day. It was relief and freedom and a momentary breath of fresh air. He was gentler than any man she’d ever kissed before, and he let her take the lead without hesitation.

She pulled him down to the couch with her and crawled into his lap as she deepened the kiss. His left arm came up to support her immediately, tightening slightly around her lower back. His right hung awkwardly in the air, a few inches away from her. She rested her hand on his shoulder and slowly drew her hand down the metal arm until her fingers found the button he’d shown her earlier.

“You do anything I don’t like, I’ll take it off,” she promised. It was half a threat and half a reassurance.

Rhys nodded, and the metal hand joined the flesh one against the small of her back. She’d expected it to be cold, but the metal arm almost burned with heat.

She threaded her fingers through his hair, and his eyes fluttered shut. A small part of her brain took note of the reaction, but the rest of her mind focused on kissing Rhys again and again.

\--

On bad nights, Sasha would lay beside Rhys in bed and trace the mess of scars on his chest. At first, she’d hesitated to touch them, but Rhys insisted he didn’t mind.

“It was a dumb accident,” he’d explained when she asked. “Some idiot decided to attempt murder via explosive package, and I was unlucky enough to set it off. But the guy who was almost murdered had more money than he knew what to do with, so he paid for the surgery and the cybernetics, and I managed to talk the doctor into fixing the other stuff wrong with my chest while he was at it. So, you know, it all worked out in the end.”

The top surgery scars were almost unnoticeable among the burns and other scars, but they were Sasha’s favorite. Mostly because of the way Rhys smiled unconsciously at any reminder they were there. She shifted in bed and pressed her lips to each of them in turn.

“You want to talk about what’s wrong?” Rhys asked.

“What makes you say something’s wrong?” she said.

“Sasha…”

“I just had the stupid dream again,” she explained. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll be fine in the morning.”

“Sasha, you almost died. It’s normal to have nightmares.”

She knows he’s saying that as much to himself as to her. She’s been woken up more than once to his screaming, his flesh arm grasping at a nonexistent weight on his neck. He refuses to sleep with his metal arm attached, but the memories don’t care.

“It’s not the dying part that bothers me,” she admitted softly. “Not really. It’s Felix. That watch was the only thing he ever gave me that he didn’t ask for something in return.”

“You think he’s going to come back and ask you for something?” Rhys asked.

“Yes… no… maybe?” She sighed and curled her body closer to his. “It’s just… it doesn’t fit with what I thought I knew about him.”

Rhys traced gentle circles on her upper back with his fingers. A few times, he looked like he might say something, but he kept quiet. Sasha buried her face in his neck and took a deep breath. He had the courtesy to pretend his didn’t notice the tears.

\--

Sometimes, she got sick of it all. The corporate bullshit, the paperwork, Rhys’ stupid face. Sometimes being woken from her own nightmares by the sound of his screaming was too much.

She knew when things were spiraling towards bad.

The first time, she tried to tough it out. She had her private breakdowns locked in whatever empty room she could find, and tried to be strong for everyone around her.

It worked right up until she and Rhys were screaming at each other over… she didn’t even remember what.

“You’re not the only one in pain, Rhys! Get over yourself!”

“I have a company to run, Sasha! Sorry I missed one goddamn date!”

Sasha turned on her heel and walked out of the room. “If you really think this is all about one date, you’re stupider than I thought.”

She was on a ship back to Pandora within an hour.

She took her comm though. It didn’t take Rhys long to send an apology. It took only a little longer for her to reply with an apology of her own.

“I’m going to stay on Pandora for a while though,” she told him. “I think we could both use the break.”

He agreed readily enough. She tried to ignore the part of her mind that said it was too readily.

She slept on Fiona’s couch for two months before she felt human enough to go back. Her sister cast worried glances whenever she thought Sasha wasn’t looking, but she was used to that. The familiarity was nice.

But being back on Pandora really only hammered in the fact that it was no longer her home. Despite everything, she was falling in love with being part of Atlas. For once, it felt like her input mattered to more than just herself and two or three others who (maybe) cared about her. It felt like she could change the world.

\--

She returned to Eden-3 with a journal full of thoughts, ideas, and plans. Rhys acted as if she’d never been gone, and took it in a stride when she asked to work with the bioengineering department.

She didn’t have Dr. Cassius’ years of studying plant life, but she had ideas, and she was quick to learn and adapt. Within a year, they were testing a variety of corn that would grow in almost any condition, including the Pandoran desert, an aloe plant with more potent healing abilities, and an edible strain of mushroom mutated to grow three times as large as normal. Finally, Sasha felt like a part of something.

Finally, she felt like she had a home.

The days blurred together into a routine of planning meetings, experiments, and phone calls. She woke up each morning with a plan, she put that plan into action, and she made a plan for the next day. Eventually, Rhys officially appointed her Bioengineering Manager.

The night they celebrated her promotion, Sasha locked herself in her and Rhys’ shared room with a bottle of vodka and sobbed like a child, ignoring Rhys banging on the door and begging her to talk to him.

“You didn’t have to take the position if you didn’t want it.”

That was the first thing Rhys said to her the next morning. They were both in their clothes from the party the previous night. Rhys had slept on the breakroom sofa and Sasha on the bathroom floor.

“That’s not the problem,” Sasha said.

“Then what is?”

“It’s that I do want this. I want this a lot.”

“Then why-”

“One thing you learn on Pandora: anything you care about, you can lose it. The more you think it’s in your grasp, the easier it’ll slip away.”

Rhys opened his mouth, hesitated, and pulled her into a hug.

“Next time, talk to me instead of locking me out?”

“I’ll try,” Sasha promised.

\--

Rhys hated nicknames. It took Sasha a while to realize, but he actually flinched when she offhandedly called him “babe” one morning over coffee.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Yvette who offered an explanation. Sasha mentioned it over their weekly lunch, and Yvette immediately nodded in understanding.

“Ninety percent of Hyperion’s culture was macho posturing,” she told Sasha. “Especially among the sharks trying to climb the ladder.”

“Sharks can’t climb ladders,” Sasha pointed out.

“It’s a metaphor. Anyway, pet names were generally used as a way to remind employees who got too noticeably ambitious who was really in charge. As you might assume, Rhys got that a lot. Add in Handsome Jack, who never referred to anyone by their first name if he could help it, and I imagine Rhys is pretty sick of people calling him stuff like that. I wouldn’t blame him. One week of sucking up to Henderson for him and I never wanted to be called “sweetheart” again.”

“Yuck. I get what you mean though. This one time, I had to get close to this guy for a con…”

The two of them spent the rest of their lunch hour relating particularly dreadful encounters with men.

When she thought about it again later, she realized Rhys had never called her by anything other than her name. She’d never found that particularly endearing before, but with this new information, well, it was something.

\--

Rhys started keeping a cot in his office. Sasha laid claim to a particularly comfortable couch in the breakroom on the bioengineering floor. Most of the time, a few nights away from each other were enough to forestall another of Sasha’s trips back to Pandora. At least for an extra few months.

Rhys was never the one to leave. He lived and breathed Atlas. As the company grew, he seemed to tie himself more completely into its inner workings, until he didn’t seem to know where the company ended and he began.

Sasha didn’t like it.

“He used to get this way in college,” Vaughn told her when she called to ask for advice. “Well, he got like that at Hyperion too if I’m being honest. He devotes himself to things and he just buries himself in them.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“I dunno. In college I would drag him to the movies or something to get his mind off things for a bit. That helped keep him from burning out completely.”

“How would you feel about me putting him on a ship to Pandora and sending him on a vacation to visit you?”

“If you can get him on a ship, I wouldn’t object.”

In the end, it took a couple little white lies, and a few bribes, but she sent Rhys running off to Pandora. It was a small relief to see he wasn’t so far gone that he’d put Atlas above his friends.

He was a little bit mad at her for tricking him into thinking his best friend was in trouble, but he came back a little less tightly wound, and he promised he would take a few days off every once in a while, so ultimately the plan was a success.

\--

Sasha was expecting more of a fight, if she was being honest.

“We’re not having kids,” she said one day.

She and Rhys were down in the garage. Loader Bot had just smugly reminded Rhys of his promise to name his firstborn child after him.

“Obviously,” Rhys replied flatly. “I don’t have the parts for it.”

“I don’t just mean biological children. I mean any children. I don’t want to be a mother.”

“Well, that works out. I’m not planning on saddling any kid with the burden of having to deal with me as a father.”

“Oh. I’m glad we’re agreed on this then.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Two weeks later, Rhys adopted a stray dog who’d been nosing around the dumpsters. Soon after that, Loader Pup became a common sight around Atlas.

They might have both been terrified at the prospect of raising a child, but a dog? A dog they could do.

\--

 “Are you sleeping with him? Vaughn, I mean.”

There was probably a more tactful time to bring it up. But she’d stopped bothering with tactful a long time ago. At least when it came to Rhys.

He startled and tried to push himself up into a sitting position.

“You could at least let a guy put his pants back on before you accuse him of cheating on you.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes, you get this look in your eyes when we’re together, like you don’t even see me. I’ve been wondering for a while now. You two seem like…”

She hesitated. Maybe she did still have some sense of tact.

“We used to,” Rhys admitted. “Back in college, I thought he was the love of my life. I guess I was kinda in love with him. But then we were hired by Hyperion and things changed. He didn’t like the kind of person I was becoming, and I didn’t like feeling like he was holding me back. I mean, we never talked about it like that, but…” He looked away from her. “By the time we got out of Hyperion, there was too much between us to fix things. Or maybe I just never tried. But either way, it’s over.”

“Then why do you look like you’re thinking about someone else?”

“You won’t like the answer.”

She pulled her knees to her chest. “Not knowing is worse.”

“Handsome Jack,” he admitted. “When he was in my head, he knew everything about me. He knew about my stupid crush on him, and he said… he said a lot of things. And sometimes I can’t get them out of my head. And I… I’m sorry.”

Sasha sighed. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He looked over at her, eyes slightly wide.

“I’m not going to blame you for the fact that a psychopath trying to mess with your head managed to succeed. It doesn’t mean I have to like it, but we’ll figure this out. Together. Deal?”

“Deal.”

\--

A broken watch and a mass of wires that once formed a cybernetic eye are twisted together in the deepest depths of Sasha’s sock drawer, behind several garishly colored pairs of Atlas brand socks. She looks at them maybe once a year, these manifestations of the demons that haunt her and Rhys. She’s considered smashing them, burning them, tossing them out an airlock. But for all that the memories associated with them are painful, they’re a part of this life she built.

Maybe someday they’ll be nothing but meaningless trinkets. That day won’t be for a very long time. But in the meantime, she's going to keep going.


End file.
